Did you have good or bad compulsory IT classes?

[Tuesday Night Fever]

My high school had three compulsory IT courses, although you could skip over the first one if you were able to prove that you had nothing to learn from it. Sadly, you couldn't do the same for the other two.

The first class, the one that you could potentially skip, was a ridiculous waste of time. It taught stuff like how to identify your computer's monitor, what a keyboard is used for, how to use a mouse, what the difference is between your desktop and your computer's desktop... shit like that, which was honestly a tad insulting even to the most computer illiterate people out there. I knew people who took this class voluntarily, even though they had nothing to learn from it, just to boost their GPA.

The second class was the slightly (key word there!) more advanced introductory course where it was assumed the students already knew things like their mouse not actually being a rodent. This course focused on teaching students how to use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. properly. Were some of the lessons useful? Sure. But were they things that a person could have figured out on their own with five minutes or so of pressing random buttons? Absolutely.

The third class was a typing class. The school decided (correctly, apparently) that computers were going to be super-duper important, and that it'd be useful for us to all know how to type. Sadly, the class wasn't skippable, so someone like me who already knew how to type was stuck in a bullshit waste of time class instead of something more important.

My high school kinda sucked.

 

[lRookiel]

I did ICT for GCSE (Dual award) which meant my compulsory lessons which I still had to go to were literally "do what I want" lessons :3

 

[ace_of_something]

On every level mine were pretty aweful. Didn't have any until high school because the state made it a law. So we had the gym teacher also trying to teach people how to use windows 95. The gym teacher didn't own a computer at home and was taking night classes 100 miles away to learn how to teach the class AS HE WAS TEACHING IT. So yeah.
College was only slightly better at the time I was starting college about 40% of my college professors still wanted things to be hand written did not allow you to use the internet for bibliographies or works cited mostly because the professor in question was born before world war II ended and didn't want to learn to use a computer. About my 3rd year in college the alumni association dumped millions into technology and we became one of the 'top ten wired campuses' in the US. Was an interesting transition. I don't believe that title still stands today though.

 

[The Artificially Prolonged]

I did an IT GNVQ in secondary school and which was stated as an "advanced IT" course. However all it amounted to was typing, typing, spreadsheets, powerpoint, some macros, really basic html and more typing, for two years. Not what I'd call advanced IT, more like the same basic stuff that we did in the previous 3 years of IT classes. In other words the easiest qualification I ever got and I spent most of the class playing flash games or playing cards with my mates.

 

[BreakfastMan]

I took a couple of game development classes at my highschool. They were pretty awesome. I really learned a ton about programming (that class basically taught me C++) and software development from those classes. I honestly don't think I would have pursued my degree (Computer Science, which I love) if I did not take those classes. So yeah, they were pretty good. XD

 

[RedLister]

The ones at my school were crap. But people struggled toget anything done due to the insanely old and crappy computers. Each lesson was an hour and it took half an hour just to log in. I was crazy enough to try and get a GNVQ which was pretty much the same as what ARtificially Prolonged said....well when the ancient old things loged you in that is.


edit: thanks for making my day TestEcull. I thought the techies at my school were bad but yours really take the cake. School techies arnt that bright are they....

 

[ToastiestZombie]

No, they didn't, and thank fuck for it. The It staff at my high school was so pathetic it was laughable.



Ok, for example, the dells they used had intel IGPs, and when they locked them down they didn't lock down the context menu on the video driver that lets you set screen rotation. So, to troll them, sometimes I'd rotate the screen 90 or 270 degrees. Not a difficult thing to fix, right? WRONG! the fucktards TURNED THE ENTIRE MONITOR ON IT'S SIDE TO FIX IT!!


With an IT staff like that any compulsory IT classes the school may have been able to offer would have been so terrible students would be better off with no IT classes at all.

Here's a story... we were "learning" to make logos that weren't just pieces of shit piled together in two seconds on powerpoint. The IT teacher said for everyone to go on fucking illustrator, thinking it's exactly like paint. It's fucking Illustrator, you don't use it for random doodles! You use either Photoshop or one of the other Adobe things for those!

 

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

So, if you're younger than say 30 then you've probably had some sort of computer education in high school, elementary school, primary or secondary school.

I'm over 30 but I did have computer education in high school (they were optional courses)

As for how they were, I knew more than the teachers.

Oh, and just for fun to age myself... In grade 7 (12-13ish yrs old) while computers were not an option, a mandatory half year typing class, with real honest to goodness typewriters, was required. Turns out that was probably the best computer class I ever took. I touch type 70+ cwpm now.

I'm also over 30, and while we did have some computers available in my school, they didn't add any classes that specifically taught anything directly related to them until after I was gone. They existed, and we occasionally used them for something related to schoolwork (most notably for a second-level physics class at the end of high school after the introductory one), but not really a whole lot.

I also learned to type on a typewriter at home and used it to write some of my school papers. What really got my typing speed up though was playing on a PVP MUD a bit later on. When someone's trying to kill you and the only way to survive is to type both quickly and accurately, you learn in a hurry. Heh.

 

[mgirl]

Hah, in our IT classes all we did was make powerpoint presentations and muck about in excel. Such a ridiculuous class. What made it more funny was that the teachers would act like using these programs was a really big deal, going through it step by step, when most kids were just pretending to do it and had various game websites in other windows. Good times.

Reminds me actually, about a month ago, in a lecture at university, one lecturer spent an entire hour telling us how to use powerpoint for a section of our coursework. As in, going through it, showing us how to make new slides and stuff. I was shocked at how stupid he assumed we all were...

 

[Tharwen]

Our teacher wrote games using VBA macros in Excel, then had us copy them out line-by-line.

I'm glad he tried to get some programming into us, but he went about it entirely the wrong way.

 

[MaxiP62]

Mine are pretty good right now, we do a variety of things such as Databases, Publications and Web Design. However I decided to take DiDA as a GCSE course, which involves Flash, Fireworks and similar stuff. Either way I'd say my school is pretty competent when it comes to ICT as we have about 400 computers and about 60 laptops, as well as the science department having their own bank of laptops, the same with english too. Oh and geography have their own too. Jesus christ my school must of invested a lot into ICT...

 

[ohnoitsabear]

The only compulsory IT classes I took were in middle school, and they kinda sucked. The only thing I really got out of them was learning to type halfway-decently. The rest of the stuff would either take 5 minutes to figure out and/or was completely worthless. But the teachers were nice, so it didn't suck too badly.

I did take some elective IT classes in High School that were awesome, mainly because the teacher was awesome, knew more about IT stuff than anybody in High School could reasonable know, and was able to teach it very well. I took two semesters of Programming from him, where I learned Visual Basic, and, perhaps more importantly, concept that can be applied to all forms of programming. I also took and introductory IT course from him, which was less of an introduction for people that don't know shit about computers, and more of an introduction for people that already know about computers and are looking to go into IT. Plus, at the end of each semester, we had an Age of Empires LAN party. It was awesome.

 

[kurupt87]

ICT Short course, it was incredibly dull. We also didn't have an actual ICT teacher, we got a rotation of teachers from Mathematics and PE; which can't have helped.

 

[Ultra Man30]

During my last year of High School, which was only last year, 3 out of my 7 classes were computer classes. Two of the classes focused on programming with Java, albeit at different paces, while the other dealt with an animation program called "Alice". The teacher was by far the nicest teacher I had, she was so nice in fact that she let us play Halo together after we finished our assigned projects. After the school year was over she let me have three programming books, an old, broken computer, and an unopened copy of Photoshop Elements 7.

 

[Powereaver]

IT Was never compulsory here as a subject.. i learned all my IT stuff on my home computer and personal experience which helped a lot

 

[him over there]

We have no such thing where I live, so bad I guess.

 

[ThePS1Fan]

My Grade 9 IT class this year consisted of Photoshop, Flash, HTML using Dreamweaver because we don't use enough Adobe (next year I think we get into InDesign and Illustrator) and some iMovie. It wasn't too bad, mostly covered the basics in each program. The class was full of people who took the course to fuck around on computers and do nothing else so that held the rest of us back a bit.